Got Framed for Murder in a Dementia Village | Part 8

 

Part 7 | Part 9

“What the fuck happened?”

Was all I could ask at the image of the damaged, ruined and almost post-apocalyptic Morlden Village that stood in front of Margaret, Luke and me. No more perfect, cozy and dementia-safe little town. The cognitive held patients were walking and continuing their lives as if their cage didn’t have turned into an actual hell.

“We took down the live-energy mining facility,” was Margaret answer which only consisted of the set-up of an idea.

Luke, even with the place now looking as damaged and torn apart as his ectoplasmic manifestation, was as confused as I was.

Crossing the road in front of us, cracked and seriously in need of a new pavement coat, Mrs. Mitchell, one of my fellow residence building E’s roommates, was lost. She was touching moldy wooden finishes of an old building while asking for the exit of the street. Disregarding the health issue, it seemed like a normal thing for her to do.

A familiar face approached her. An eerily wide smile, in the middle of a face that seemed forced as a Jack Nicholson impression on the border of popping its cheek muscles due to the strain. It was the motherfucking barber I saw on my first day here. Never saw him out of his working establishment before. And, weirdly, his silence and almost crying face were more disturbing than that of the average caregiver; which were all gone thanks to Paula’s rage.

The middle-aged man was squishing on his left hand, with cramp-inducing intent, her work tool. An almost one-foot-long, old barber blade shone against the morning sunlight. It disappeared once the sharp metal point got introduced into Mrs. Mitchell upper abdomen.

Shit.

He took the cover in blood weapon out of the elder victim.

“Hey!” I screamed just to get his attention, because I had nothing planned.

My strategy in fact achieved that.

Mrs. Mitchell collapsed into the dirty ground on the sidewalk. A fountain of red fluid burst out of her wound, as if she was the Athens of a gore-loving Poseidon (even more than the original Greek god).

I ran fast towards the quiet maniac with not really a plan in mind. He approached me in a weirdly calmed fashion, but faster than me. Luke and Margaret limited themselves to enjoying the clash as viewers.

I kneeled just a couple of feet away from him in the middle of the street.

The not so intelligent bastard tripped with my body and smashed his head against the ground.

I continued my way towards Mrs. Mitchell, who was lying in a blood pond by now. Took off my jacket. The freezing cold of the Nordic shitty and depressing climate struck my bare arms as a thousand small needles. The stiff piece of clothing worked as a rudimentary and very useless patch.

Behind me, when Margaret was approaching, she got surprised by the crazy barber. She dodged a couple of heavy swings from his knife.

My hands were starting to soak in blood as the absorbing capabilities of my warming garment had come to its limit. The old woman was so stiff that it was as if her body was refusing to me carrying her.

“Luke, get inside her!” I instructed having faith in the cognitive detriment of Mrs. Mitchell.

Luke’s ghostly form levitated towards me and disappeared into the bleeding body.

Margaret was swinging a rock from the damaged street against the barber’s head, with very little success in stopping his carnage urge.

Luke’s deformed head emerged from the already unconscious woman I was applying pressure to.

“Her mind is a maze,” Luke informed me through the supernatural-communicating earphone that was, surprisingly, still in my ear canal.

“Then solve it. I need you to help me walk her towards the medical unit.”

Luke’s peeking eyes went back inside Mrs. Mitchell.

I tied my jacket as hard as I could around the hurt old lady.

“You tried magic already?” I yelled at Margaret, who at that point I had no idea what she was doing to keep the bastard busy.

“Not that easy!”

Her squeaky voice pierced my eardrums with the sound waves vibrating through my nape.

Mrs. Mitchell, on the ground at my knees, opened her eyes as if she had just woken up from a horrible nightmare and grasped for air as much as her damaged lungs allowed her to. I pushed her into standing.

“Get up. We need to go now,” was my command to the possessed lady.

“I… can’t… can’t… breathe,” Luke said with the old woman’s airless and damaged vocal-cords voice.

I propelled the fragile skeleton covered with a thin layer of flesh towards the South. Mrs. Mitchell’s legs were giving small but steady steps.

“You don’t breathe anymore, you’ll be fine,” I assured Luke.

Top-notch ghostly pep talk if you asked me.

“Be careful,” Margaret’s voiced reached me from far away.

I turned back to encounter the barber jumping against me. He made my head hit the ground. His weight was overwhelming over my bruised body. I got dizzy. He raised his weapon covered with the dripping viscous substance that had started to coagulate already. I held his hands in place.

Luke, in Mrs. Mitchell body, turned to bleed some more while watching me struggle with another psycho killer.

“Get her to the medical unit!” I screamed as the blade was approaching me without the slightest intention of stopping.

A weird, high-pitch mumbling preceded the energy ball hitting the barber off me.

Margaret had on its right hand a glowing-energy mandala, that looked mystic as fuck, ready to be thrown against our crazy adversary.

Luke/Mrs. Mitchell and I stood up, watching the supreme-sorcerer abilities of our thankfully now ally. The barber fled away in his fours as if he was a scared puppy.

“Let’s go!” Was Margaret taking the lead in the situation.

***

We reached the medical unit in a couple of minutes. Mrs. Mitchell, unconscious, but with a walking body, was leaving a blood trail through the dystopian and maintenance-less new version of the compound. Seriously doubted it was going to be cleaned by tomorrow.

We didn’t have to knock on the main glass door. It was broken. But we did it as a courtesy to Carly before we came inside, following her desperate and confused yells.

“We need your help. Well, she needs,” I announced when we arrived at the main room.

I had been taken care of multiple times before in that same room. But, with the dust and cobwebs all around the tile-less walls and leaking ceilings, it had become a more dangerous health hazard than the five-inch gash that had drained all of Mrs. Mitchell’s blood on our way here. At least the lack of constant electricity kept the lights twinkling, making it impossible to evaluate how bad the damage was.

“The vendages are all fucking expired,” Carly brought more bad news with her once she walked into the room.

She sprinted towards us, helping me push the uncooperative body of the pale octogenary onto a table.

“All pain medication is also useless,” Carly was on a streak.

“No,” was Luke simple and almost unhearable response through Mrs. Mitchell’s mouth.

He levitated out of the old woman’s chest. Mrs. Mitchell started to convulse or some shit. For the surprise reaction of Margaret and Carly’s hysterical “what the fuck?!” shriek, I assumed no one else saw the murdered spirit of a young man leave the now unconscious body.

“Luke!” I reprehend the ghoul as if he was a toddler.

“She said there was no painkillers!”

“Grow some balls!”

“We’re losing her,” Carly, unlike Luke and I, was very on point with her information.

“We?” Margaret replied.

“Yes, WE. I need your help. Get a pen and unscrew it.”

Margaret started looking in the continuous room.

“Also get from the glass cabinet some alcohol!” Carly continued her leadership.

“Luke, get back in there and hold that body in place,” I ordered.

The ghost followed my instructions like a soldier. His ectoplasmic form flew inside Mrs. Mitchell’s shaking body.

Carly looked at me as a crazy demented patient that belong to this place, while keeping her pressure on the wound.

“It’s a ghost…”

My explanation got interrupted by Luke managing to control and stop the unvoluntary movements of the old lady at the table.

“Can’t… breathe,” was almost uncomprehensive coming out of those wrinkled and non-gesticulating lips.

“Her lung is collapsing,” Carly let me know as if I would new what to do with that information.

Before I could ask a dumb question, she got up to speed with my self-taught, antique and deficient medical formation gotten in the worst place on Earth where medicine had been practiced.

“Get the least rusty scalpel you can get.”

I left the improvised operating room at the same time Margaret returned with the pen.

While looking in broken and almost unopenable drawers, I could hear the situation getting more tense.

“Doesn’t make sense, she should be shaking like crazy right now,” Carly explained.

“He has a foreign spirit inside keeping her steady,” Margaret backed me up with the old spiritists’ scammer. “What you need this for?”

“Clean it, just need the tube.”

“Found a perfect condition needle. Does it work?” I yelled at the next room.

“A scalpel!” Carly returned an angrier and louder scream.

“Sorry, but there is not much to work here,” I mumbled to myself.

“Ready, now what?” Margaret questioned Carly across the wall.

I found a good enough for my standards knife.

“Where’s the scalpel?!” Carly was losing her shit.

I entered the room with the tool in my hand, almost running, and with a victorious smug smirk on my face.

“Here it is,” I announced as if it was the philosopher’s stone.

“Clean it,” Carly instructed me.

I emptied the rubbing alcohol bottle on top of the almost orange thing. If Mrs. Rowen didn’t die for lack of oxygen, she certainly will of tetanus.

“You push that thing around two inches deep on the hole he does in the third intercostal muscles,” the health professional informed Margaret of her duties.

I know that muscle. Before waiting for Carly to clarify with small-kids-English, I made a deep cut in the designated area all the way into Mrs. Mitchell lung.

“NOW!” Carly and I commanded Margaret at the same time.

She stuck the pen’s tube into the recently carved hole.

Mrs. Mitchell gasped as she inhaled as much air as possible.

All shit stabilized.

Luke left the poor’s woman body, leaving her unconscious and deeply breathing in the table. Margaret and I, in shock, saw Mrs. Mitchell’s almost blood-less body, which looked like she had just taken her sleep pills. Carly kept applying gausses.

“That was awful,” Luke complained.

“Don’t be such a wuss,” I replied while I caught my breath as well.

Carly looked at Margaret with a troubled face.

“You get used to him doing that.”

Carly nodded and finished her dressing work.

“Okay,” Carly took a deep breath for paranormal and supernatural assimilation. “What caused all my inventory to go to shit so quickly?”

“Not just yours. All Morlden Village is like that,” I clarified.

“Why?”

Carly connected a monitoring machine to Mrs. Mitchell. It was surprising that it had enough battery to run.

“We cut Mrs. Rowen life power supply. She can’t keep the “new and perfect” version of this place anymore.”

Margaret’s explanation made sense, and I reprehend my desire to “I told you so” to Carly, but our magical ally’s voice was different. Deeper and hoarser. Having a harder time getting enough air out.

Carly and I turned towards Margaret, who was now an old woman. Not like Mrs. Mitchell or any other deteriorated patient in this prison. She seemed like a strong, still conscious, straight standing and badass grandma. Her appearance had a familiarity to it.

“Told you there was weird shit in this place,” I couldn’t hold it back a second time.

Carly’s brain was running a thousand miles per hour trying to get up to speed with the weirdness that Luke and I had been dealing with daily.

A crash interrupted her mental process. A rain of glass shreds rattling hijacked Margaret’s, Luke’s and my attention.

“That machine of yours don’t do that sound, right?”

“No,” Carly answered me.

Well, at least the barber looney was considerate enough to give us a headstart.

“Get her on a trolley and take her out of here,” I directed Carly and Margaret.

It took them a second to comply. I grabbed the tiny scalpel I had retrieved a couple of minutes ago and cling to it as if my life depended on it.

The barber appeared in the room’s threshold with his barber blade, sharpened and shining under the inconsistent white lights from the ceiling. This was a knives battle to the dead.

Luke flew through the barber without him even noticing.

I charged him directly.

Carly pushed the litter with Mrs. Mitchell in it, while Margaret helped with the monitor.

The barber’s swing at me got interrupted when a rusty scalpel stabbed his back. Luke used his limited physical control to twist it.

The barber attempted to take it out. I took advantage of his unguarded position and slashed his arm.

The barber’s blade clanked on the floor.

Luke used a second scalpel to penetrate the crazy guy’s shoulder plate.

I did another cut in his abdomen.

Two more scalpels pierced directly to the bastard’s kidneys.

I finished by doing an “Un Chien Andalou” against the barber’s eye.

Luke’s incorporeal form took my weapon and perforated our foe’s aorta.

The heavy corpse of the creepy barber fell to the ground with a splash of his crimson internal fluid.

“Good job. You’re getting handy to control physical objects.”

“Small things are easy.”

“Let’s go, he will get back up…”

My warning got interrupted by the true of my premonition. The sluggish and clumsy standing up of this European Michael Myers (the Halloween guy, not Austin Powers) allowed us to get out of there.

On our way out, I dropped behind me all the cabinets, chemicals and medical equipment which names I didn’t know in a desperate attempt to delay our attacker. The metallic and glass impacts of the floor became obfuscated by a familiar voice coming from outside the building.

“Margaret, you traitor!”

It was Mrs. Rowen’s voice, clearly. But it felt older, more tired, hoarser. And, sure enough, once Luke and I exited the medical unit, she was there. A dozen yards away from us, blocking Carly’s and Margaret’s way. A wrinkled, hunched and arthritic old hag wearing a cape over her was making threats.

“You’ll pay for this!”

Margaret left the monitor in Carly’s care. Out of nowhere, glowing and morphing mandalas, around three-foot-wide, appeared on both her hands. Our old magic aid assumed a defensive position.

With an ease that her face muscles shouldn’t be able to handle, old Mrs. Rowen smiled and turned her dark and hope-sucking eyes on me.

“Bring him to me,” Mrs. Rowen said to the barber killer that was stumping towards me from inside the medical building.

Mrs. Rowen’s attention got back towards Margaret. Burning hot clouds of ash materialized around the old manager’s body.

“Keep him busy,” I indicated Luke.

He nodded.

Mrs. Rowen threw a black gas sphere against Margaret, who used her mystic dishes as a shield. A spell battle, between the witch that had been in control of this dementia village since forever and the recently turned into the bright side helper, broke lose.

I approached Carly. She was petrified and mentally overstimulated by everything that was happening. I shook her a little bit to bring her back to the present. She wasn’t cooperating. I respectfully slapped her, just to get her out of her trance.

“Get her into residence building A,” I whispered at her ear.

Just partially aware of what was happening, she nodded a thousand times.

A ball of light-devoid dust impacted on one of Margaret’s magical shields, changing its trajectory to the sky. It fell over us. I violently pushed Margaret and the mobile bed with the already difficult time breathing Mrs. Mitchell out of harm’s way. The back of my head felt a blazing temperature as it got covered in dark particles.

My painful cry got Carly out of her trance. Surely is still avoiding acceptance of what’s happening, but at least her head was in the game. She began pushing her patient towards the indicated residences.

Back from me, just outside the medical unit building, Luke’s non-physical ghostly form was using his abilities to pull and yank the psycho barber, who kept on throwing swings with his homicidal tool against my friend. All his attacks went through Luke causing him no harm. It was like watching a not very smart kid fighting a mosquito.

On Margaret’s hands, both her supernatural plates grew spikes around their circumference, creating some weird sparkling saws. She tossed one of them against her opponent, but Mrs. Rowen deviated it with a hellish blizzard of ash and melting rocks that came from behind her.

The mystical circular saw rolled in the air before landing perpendicularly against the grass, just down from the external ladder that led up to the health building’s roof. Margaret closed her hands and then pushed them apart, growing the kaleidoscopic shield she still had with her. The radial geometric saw made of pure magic, still engraved in the ground, did the same.

Mrs. Rowen summoned a shadowy smog wall and sent it against Margaret. The witchcraft battle continued.

I ran towards the external ladder fixed in the wall of the medical facility, jumping the six-foot-wide glowing saw half buried into the ground. Some of my muscles teared under my weight and inertia of falling when I hold into the metallic rungs. I contained my discomfort, letting out an order:

“Luke, help Carly!”

Carly was already a couple of yards away, but was having a hard time pushing the uncooperative Mrs. Mitchell. Luke nodded at me again and left alone the barber with murderous tendencies.

The barber’s blade assassin charged towards me. Without missing a bit, I started my ascent towards the roof.

My arms beg me to give them a rest.

The ladder shook under the weight of my pursuer.

My soles slipped in the frictionless steps.

The barber growled like a confused predator.

I crawled my way into the ceiling and dashed my way across the big, surprisingly still-holding roof.

The end of the ladder trembled with every thump taken up by Mrs. Rowen’s minion.

From there, I could see the whole Morlden Village, falling to pieces as if it was having a crossover with “Silent Hill.” From beyond the walls keeping me trapped, a normal, dementia-village-ignoring European town was having a normal winter’s day.

The barber’s eyes peeked an inch into the roof.

I charged him, inverting our roles.

The now prey continued raising his head over the ceiling level.

I field-goaled his head with all my strength.

The brawl mass that apparently wouldn’t die lost his grip on the ladder, flew a little, dropped at least nine feet towards the ground and landed on Mrs. Rowen magical saw. His head got detached from his body. He stopped moving.

The blood covered mystical construct disappeared.

The spell war between evil manager and good caregiver continued. It was like a Marx prophecy come true, but with magic.

I hadn’t managed to breathe again when the fucking slasher villain of a barber started twitching again. His arms, stiff and with unvoluntary spasms, pulled the head back to his neck. Like if he was fighting his damaged body, nature’s wish for him to stay down and death itself, the barber got back on his feet.

Fuck. Another idiot idea. I hate those.

I jumped from the building aiming at the reanimated barber.

Bullseye.

Landing over him cushioned my fall, yet my bones felt like they had been used as a molcajete (mortar and pestle). The big, smirking, non-blinking guy who succumbed to my weight, kept fighting his own clumsiness and dizziness as he recovered his spatial understanding.

I ran away of the zombie barber and the witches’ battle.

***

“Go help Margaret.”

Luke’s ectoplasmic self did a military gesture and disappeared from the lobby of residence building A in which I had just arrived.

Carly, for once, didn’t give a shit about me talking “alone.” She was too busy trying to keep Mr. Bunn away from the delicate Mrs. Mitchell.

“Please, I love her!” Was Mr. Bunn’s cry.

No matter how many times Carly told him that she was okay, just needed some space, the octogenary was relentless.

I knocked loudly against the closest door to the common area. It was, of course, locked by something heavy on the other side.

“There’s no one here,” Carly said while keeping weak Mr. Bunn at a safe distance from the catatonic patient.

I ignored her.

“Elisa!” I kept banging on the door. “I know you are there! We need you.”

“Go away.” Elisa’s strong, wise voice came from inside the room.

“Who’s her?” Carly asked, surprised that someone was still making a stand in such a damaged and unsecure residence building.

“She’s the love of my life!” Mr. Bunn’s complaints were getting tiresome.

I ignored them both and left Carly deal with him a little. I was almost in a self-imposed hostage situation.

“Elisa,” was time to exercise my negotiation skills. “I can take down this door, leaving the whole room vulnerable. I don’t want to do that. We need help with a much bigger situation and a safe place to stash Mrs. Mitchell…”

“My love!”

“Shut up, Mr. Bunn!” I yelled angrily, then calmed myself again. “A motherfucker maniac is after us and you can’t just keep on hiding here from Mrs. Rowen because she’s fucking insane.”

No word from the other side of the room. Just a heavy breathing.

“Elisa, right?” Carly approached the door. “I know you’re scared.”

A chirp came from outside the building. It moved across the wall and towards the main door.

“I’m not even sure what it is that’s going on here, to be honest,” Carly continued her soft and empathic approach. “Until a couple of hours, I still believed this was just a very fancy place to help cognitively held patients.”

I placed myself in between the main doors, the unconscious patient and Mr. Bunn. The creak kept approaching and didn’t sound helpful to our interests.

“Get fast to the point,” I mumbled loudly enough for Carly to hear.

“I’m afraid of this place, of Mrs. Rowen, the ghosts and creatures he talks about all the time. But I can’t just stay hiding.” Carly continued talking to the shut door. “Not only for me, for Mrs. Mitchell here and the rest of people who are really unable to do that.”

The barber, full of injuries and a deformed face, kicked the main doors of the building open in an unnecessary aggressive way.

A squeak, constant and ear-piercing, came from Elisa’s room.

She opened her door.

As Carly pulled the trolley held down by Mr. Bunn’s uncooperative grieve, I pushed it towards the unblocked area of the building while avoiding the dull blade swings that came my way. I just got one big slash on my back.

After we were all inside the small, and weirdly still maintained room, I closed the door using my whole weight to hold the crazy killer on the other side. Elisa and Carly watched me having a hard time, while Mr. Bunn was still useless begging at Mrs. Mitchell peaceful rest (how much I envied her at that time).

“Get the furniture here!”

Carly and Elisa finally joined the situation and pushed the rotten ebony dressing table against the thin barrier I was keeping standing to separate us from the barber serial killer.

The table’s weight prevented the guy from pushing it open. Its height was perfect to avoid the knob from turning completely. Its dimensions matched the tiny welcome area of the room down to the inch, making it unmovable. It was absurd how safe Elisa’s accommodations were, especially considering it was one of the two bedrooms not used by a cognitively deteriorated patient in a compound made to keep people with dementia unharmed.

“What’s going on?” Elisa questioned.

“That guy out there,” I started talking over the poundings on the door behind me, “ he was this fucking place’s barber.”

Carly and Elisa looked at me wondering how I knew that. Irrelevant.

“Now Mrs. Rowen wants him to deliver me to her,” I concluded.

“Shit.”

Elisa’s single word answer was hiding something. Before I could ask her, Luke appeared in the window.

“I need you to open it quickly,” my ghostly friend asked me.

I did. Carly and Elisa stared at me as if I was on the same mental wavelength as the sobbing Mr. Bunn there. I’m already used to that.

The barber’s hitting on the door stopped, but nobody noticed nor considered worthy of attention.

I opened the glass just enough for Luke to get inside the souvenir he was physically carrying in his left hand. I secured the second entrance to our trench. Luke let Margaret’s bracelet fall on the floor between the living watchers.

“How did that float into here?” Elisa continued with her not-up-to-speed questions.

In between the whispers of Carly explaining Luke’s ghoulish existence (which she herself doubted) to Elisa, and Mr. Bunn’s exponentially louder shrieks, I got the information that really mattered from Luke.

From below the dressing table that was maintaining our foe at a safe distance from us, tiny blood streams started swirling towards us. The fucker was now killing more elders to draw us out.

“Why’s Margaret’s amulet not with her?” Elisa kept demanding to know information that, in this case, couldn’t be provided by Carly.

“Luke says that Mrs. Rowen managed to knock it out of her wrist,” I synthetized the events.

Elisa’s worried and wrinkled face turned into an almost dehydrated horror one. Her strong lungs pronounced a single word for the second time in the night (a new record): “Shit.”

I skimmed through the bedroom looking for some sort of weapon. The closest to it was Elisa’s walker. Why she had one, if she didn’t even use it before getting his ring and strength back, is beyond me. Snatched it and tore one of the metal legs against the floor.

***

With my improvised, half-bent aluminum, short bo staff, I opened the door that led to the lobby of the residence building we had taken as headquarters. Elisa and Carly closed the door behind me as soon as I was out of the way. Such lack of trust was hurting.

As expecting, just outside our fortress, a collapsed old man I’d never seen before was dealing with having his whole neck slashed. It was like a second mouth that vomited all the blood that the poor man’s inefficient heartbeats managed to pump.

And, waiting, at the other side of the lobby, over the caregiver’s bed, was the unkillable murderous machine that wanted me for his master. He stood up from the bed and tracked my every move with his dark, soulless eyes.

I step closer to him.

He dashed towards me as if I had just shot the start gun.

I strongly clasped the metal improvised defense hardware I had provided myself, and baseballed the bastard’s head. I was really sporty that day.

My attacker crumbled to the ground, in the same state as Mrs. Mitchell at the other side of the door. His heavy and stiff limbs caused a little rumbling in the building. Surprisingly, the now old, humid and never cared for building didn’t give in over my head.

The wooden barrier that protected my allies, and had been used by them to deliver me as a sacrifice to the unconscious motherfucker, opened slowly again. Carly and Elisa now did want a sneak peek to the action.

I dashed into the kitchen, that thankfully still had its sharp cutting knife inside the plastic dementia-proof box. I snatched the real weapon.

I proceeded to drag the unmoving barber’s corpse, that soon was going to wake up, towards our safe room.

“Luke, get inside him,” I commanded my supernatural friend.

Carly and Elisa looked at the empty space between them where they inferred Luke was.

“I can’t…”

“Of course you can! You got inside Mrs. Mitchel mind, managed to physically fight this fucker and even retrieved Margaret’s bracelet. You’re so fucking badass, this is just an empty carcass.”

Luke watched me for a couple of seconds. I meant what I said. He disappeared inside the corpse I had just brought.

Carly and Elisa glanced at me, expecting I would give them the plan instructions. Luckily, since before my last encounter, I had a solid one already running.

“Let’s go help Margaret.”

***

The barber, possessed by Luke, dragged me into Mrs. Rowen’s office.

Upon entering there, my shinbone, broken when I was a kid by a witch, started to burn as it usually did in that place. I reprehend the pain to keep up my act as an unconscious prisoner. My feet bumped into a couple of fallen pictures that couldn’t support being hung anymore by rusty nails to the now cracking walls.

On the opposite side of the decolored and moldy desk, Mrs. Rowen was patiently waiting for me. I had my eyes closed, yet I felt her vicious smile.

Luke, using the man who had been hunting me for the whole day, sat me in the chair I had used countless times before. The big, scarred hand that wielded the barber’s knife slapped my face. I pretended to wake up and be confused.

So close to Mrs. Rowen, even under the fainting lightbulbs resulting from her poor control of the village, I distinguished she looked so similar to the old lady that received me on my first night here. For the unexperienced and ignorant, they would have passed as twins. Same fissured nails, yellow teeth and almost dripping skin.

“My God, maybe now you need to be taken in as a patient here,” I mockingly provoked the witch on the other side of the room.

“Maybe I’ll intern you again. Would you like that?”

Her hoarse voice that came from the air she could get in her mouth (nothing got all the way to her lungs) chilled me. I was at a complete disadvantage. Yet, it wasn’t my first rodeo.

“You want an asthma inhaler?”

With a force unlikely to her appearance, she stood up and hit the table. It squeaked a little and, against all odds, stayed complete.

“Shut the fuck up! You should be begging for mercy.”

She sounded so convinced about her threat that I almost fell for it.

From the back of my pants, I retrieved the kitchen knife from residence building A and pointed it at Mrs. Rowen. She contemplated my move for a couple of seconds, then laughed maniacally.

“Are you really that stupid?” She asked while taking her seat in a more relaxed corporality and mood.

“No.”

I turned the knife against my throat and pretended to go for the kill. Mrs. Rowen flinched for a second, just an almost imperceptible instant of weakness. That’s all I needed to make sure I had the upper hand, for now.

“Where’s Margaret?” I demanded to know.

Mrs. Rowen stared deeply into my eyeballs. In absolute silence. My shinbone erupted in discomfort, as if it was covered in flames. I sucked it in.

I impaled the knife more decidedly on my neck. My adversary got closer to stop me, before going back to her chair. A couple drops of the red living fluid rolled down the blade.

“She’s in the shed.”

I smiled knowing that phase one had worked. That was the easy one.

I stand up from my squeaky and in mid-putrefaction seat, still with the oxidated kitchen gadget in my breathing system.

“The shed keys.”

I extended my free hand towards Mrs. Rowen. She learned her lesson and cooperated from the first time. The bulky keychain she had stashed in her drawer was in my possession almost immediately.

Using the back of the kitchen handle, I smashed in a thousand pieces the dusty window that connected the office with the exterior. It worked because of the decaying state of the glass, sure, but it was expected that everything would be in that deplorable situation.

The barber attacked Mrs. Rowen. Her old body snapped when she turned around to see what was happening. Too late. The barber blade stabbed her in the abdomen, creating a bigger wound than that endured by Mrs. Mitchell.

“Die!” Mrs. Rowen exhaled.

The old, wounded witch threw a deadly spell against her servant.

Luke ejected his specter form out of the body receiving the magic assault just in time.

On impact, the crazy barber was thrown back against the spoilt wooden wall, making it crack.

Luke flew in front of me, snatched the keys I had laying on my hand, and whirled into the freezing sunset.

The elder killer, kept under control by his daywork in a barbershop, dropped inertly to the floor. His stiff muscles contracted. His skin rotted in record time and pulled his mouth and eyes open widely. He died as a decomposed mummy, for good.

Mrs. Rowen coughed loudly and profusely, trying to say something. But her collapsing lungs and mouth full of blood prevented it. I didn’t want to hear her further.

I sought in all the drawers, cabinets and folders inside her office. The exit keys, the ones to open the main gates that were holding captive in this haunted village, were nowhere to be found. I kicked a metallic file organizer while Mrs. Rowen’s final exhalation came out of her.

I left that place through the broken window, carefully to avoid any cut, and sprinted towards the North. Just a couple of yards before arriving at the shed.

Outside it, the chains and lock waited for me on the floor. The entrance was wide open. The light from the dusk was the only thing that allowed me to make sense of the absolute mess that the shed had turned into. Dirty, dusty and rusty. Even worse than when I got inside it the first time.

Luke, as a ghost, was trying to use his sometimes still failing physical capabilities to insert Margaret’s bracelet on her wrist. But, our ally, who had sacrificed for us, was now a true patient of the Morlden Village. Hunched, weak, trembling and without any sense of self, where or when. Like if floating jewelry wasn’t something to worry about, she turned away and complained about wanting to be naked.

I grabbed her before she had the chance to take her desire into her own hands. Luke slid the bracelet into place. Margaret, the elder but strong and mentally capable version of her, returned.

“That was awful.”

“Sure. Where does Mrs. Rowen hid the main entrance keys?”

“In the safe. Hid?”

“Yes. Luke stabbed her. But I couldn’t find the missing keys.”

Luke smiled proud of himself and nodded at Margaret, even when he knew she couldn’t see him.

Margaret’s face lost all its color in an instance.

“That’s not enough.”

An eardrum-drilling shriek rumbled the shed from outside.